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Stephanie Syjuco in "San Francisco Bay Area" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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    ♪ ♪
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    I come from a pretty traditional
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    sculpture background in the sense that I
    spent four years
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    in art school, literally just making things.
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    You know, to hand-make something mean
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    you're going to process it.
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    Like, it comes into your head,
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    and then it moves
    through your body,
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    and then it gets pushed back
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    out into the world.
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    [sewing machine whirring]
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    I'm interested in how objects reflect
    cultural moments.
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    And I think I'm trying to figure out, you know,
    why we value what we value.
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    [electronic music]
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    So with the
    "Counterfeit Crochet Project,"
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    I invited crochet crafters from all over the world
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    to join me in bootlegging
    designer handbags.
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    The invitation was to choose a designer handbag that you would like to own,
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    but couldn't afford, download an image from
    it online
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    and then using your own crochet crafting skills, hand-make it.
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    And interestingly, it touched a nerve, and, you know, lots of people started to join up,
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    and then send me photographs of
    themselves with their handmade bags.
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    It was fun and lighthearted,
    but invariably what would happen was,
    you know,
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    we would have these really great
    discussions about everything from the
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    hierarchy of the fashion system to you know,
    global counterfeiting schemes.
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    I think one of the reasons I got
    interested in this idea of like bootlegs
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    or counterfeits is actually, it's an
    extension from this idea that there is
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    an authentic, and you know from a very
    personal standpoint
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    I was really curious about what it meant to be an authentic, um, Filipino.
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    I was thinking a lot about historical
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    ethnographic photography
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    Specifically, um, images I'd
    seen taken in the Philippines.
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    ♪ ♪
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    So the whole series is made in Omaha
    Nebraska, which I think is hilarious
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    And I had gone
    to the shopping malls,
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    and using my credit card, purchased mass-consumer goods,
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    took them back to my studio,
    and then styled them.
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    And then returned them all
    to the department stores for full store credit.
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    So it was kind of this way of thinking about what we wanna consume in those images,
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    partaking in it, but then also denying it.
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    This is something that, um...
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    It's a portrait of
    my mother and myself,
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    um, not long after we moved to,
    the U.S. from the Philippines.
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    And then for my birthday, she decided to take me to Disneyland.
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    And so this photograph is actually,
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    I think, in the Frontierland, where you can pay to have your portrait
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    taken after you put on all these western
    costumes.
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    I think, you know, at the time we were
    trying on these fictional identities of
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    what it might have looked like to be a
    new American.
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    Also, I mean,
    it's an amazing portrait.
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    Like, my mom is 22 years old
    here, and she looks beautiful,
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    and I'm this
    angry little four year old.
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    [Laughs]
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    - [singing "El Breve Espacio
    En Que No Estás"]
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    The title of my next exhibition is
    called "Citizens"
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    I think there's always been embedded
    politics in my work,
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    whether it's issues of colonialism or capitalism
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    but given recent politics I've been
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    really trying to figure out how to
    actually put it more at the forefront.
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    - Ready to fight?
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    Crowd: Damn Right!
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    - Are you ready to fight?
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    Crowd: Damn Right!
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    The Bay Area has been a real flash point
    for a lot of recent protests and so I
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    and so I feel like I've been
    in the middle of it.
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    You know, you watch the news,
    you watch images flashing by,
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    and you're kind of trying
    to process it all.
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    - We need to figure out how wide
    the actual banner is.
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    And I was noticing that this
    one particular banner kept popping up.
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    And depending
    on how it was held up,
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    or how it was being displayed you could or
    in some cases could not read the text
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    - Cool.
    - All right.
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    And so
    I downloaded those images,
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    and then, you know,
    traced it on the computer,
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    projected it onto a larger piece of fabric,
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    and then hand sewed it.
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    It says "Become Ungovernable,"
    and it's kind of, you know,
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    I feel like the banner itself
    is becoming ungovernable.
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    Like, it's got loose ends,
    it's got, you know,
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    the text itself is kind of, like, falling off the page,
    um so it's trying to kind of embody that
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    um, so it's kitrying
    to kind of embody that,
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    that inability to be controlled.
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    One of the problems,
    I think, with slogans
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    is that people think they already know what the slogan means,
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    and so you can either shut off to it,
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    or you can, you know, nod your head in agreement.
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    So when I was using
    these images of protests,
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    I was more interested in
    actually how they're filtered
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    through media channels.
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    [Sewing machine whirring]
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    In a lot of my projects,
    I'm really interested in this connection between
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    the analog and the digital
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    So, I decided to create this huge hand sewn quilted checkerboard background
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    [mouse clicks]
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    And it resembles a Photoshop transparency background
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    When you cut out an image in Photoshop,
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    Photoshop will put in this like really weird you know, checkerboard pattern.
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    It's actually to point out this idea that,
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    you know, digital culture is not neutral
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    that simply because there's a computer
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    involved doesn't mean that there isn't
    human labor
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    ♪ ♪
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    Um, hmm.
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    Yeah, let me
    go hand that to you.
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    Yeah, I think we could
    try something like this.
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    I feel like I'm constantly
    making things.
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    And I do feel like I have this
    ratio that I've worked out
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    where I call it
    the sort of 80/20 ratio,
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    where 80% of what I make
    is kind of crap,
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    but somehow I have to produce
    it to get to the 20%,
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    which is successful.
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    [laughs]
    It's kind of like rubble,
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    but not really.
    [chuckles]
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    - Did you all buy
    the fabric this color?
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    - Yeah, so this is, um, chroma
    key fabric, the green screen.
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    I've been gravitating to
    working with chroma key
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    which is this awful, acid color.
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    I'm standing in front of a green chroma
    key screen. Anything that you photograph
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    or shoot in front of this screen, you can
    put in any type of backdrop,
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    you can create a fantasy scene.
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    [laughter]
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    [camera shutter snaps]
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    And so, thinking about both
    politics and social strife
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    and everything that's kind of permeated
    and saturated everything,
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    you know, now it's just this kind of
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    constant in our backgrounds.
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    You know, what does that mean
    to then use chroma key as the literal subject
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    instead of ignoring it?
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    ♪ ♪
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    - All right.
    Wanna grab that one, Durham?
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    So, I became a U.S. citizen when I was 26 years old. Despite having lived here
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    since I was three , I had to kind of make
    that decision,
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    and then go through the process of the citizenship test.
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    - All right, I am an..
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    I was thinking a lot about a 1942
    photograph taken by Dorothea Lange.
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    and she had taken a photograph of an
    Oakland store front
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    where a Japanese American had a business there,
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    and upon
    the notification for Japanese internment
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    he had put up a sign in the window that just proclaimed "I am an American."
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    - Um, let's do the scrunching.
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    The idea that citizenship can
    be given and also taken away
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    was something
    that really interested me.
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    because I do feel like there's been a
    lot of Reckoning with people having to
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    struggle with what it means to be an
    American today.
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    Like, what do we stand for?
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    What can we become?
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    [cell phone snaps]
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    My current studio is located in a really industrial part of the Bay
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    It overlooks San Francisco, actually.
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    So, just looking out over the water, you can see it at a distance.
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    You know, I grew up in that city,
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    I relocated to Oakland four years ago,
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    because I couldn't afford to stay in San Francisco anymore.
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    You know, the Bay area
    can be a really wonderful kind of fermenting space for
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    for artists.
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    Not because it's easy to live here,
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    'cause it's not easy to live here,
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    but there are ways that
    artists can create community
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    and spaces for themselves here.
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    If we're to look at the complexity of our contemporary culture,
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    our political moment,
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    you know, our lived realities,
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    I want my work to be as
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    complicated as well.
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    That there isn't just one way to look at it, you know,
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    that depending on your perspective you'll see
    it a different way
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    And I also want it to inhabit
    contradictions.
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    - All right. Fierce
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    And so, you know,
    looking at images of protests,
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    we created
    these composite characters.
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    And so they're fictions.
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    Black-clad individuals
    are usually associated with,
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    you know,
    a kind of very direct action.
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    Is it a character
    that one finds problematic,
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    or is it something that
    might elicit even you know, some empathy?
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    There's a portrait of someone covered in a very sheer gray-and-white
    checkerboard pattern.
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    The portrait is of
    a person who is undocumented.
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    It's a difficult thing for me
    to talk about, actually,
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    because given the state of our contemporary political situation,
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    you know, that person
    could be taken at any minute.
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    Depending on how you read that image
    it's about either the removal
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    or about their protection.
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    One really important
    possibility for art
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    is that it is
    a recording device, you know.
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    I mean, it's a subjective one,
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    but it's a device, that, somehow through an individual or a
    group of individuals
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    processes a situation
    in the world,
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    and then creates a
    subjective viewpoint of that.
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    As evidence.
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    I do not think at all that my work, in
    and of itself,
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    is actually going to change the system
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    What I'm interested in though, is somehow reflecting a possibility.
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    What I'm doing is kind of like
    absorbing and processing
    the world around me,
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    and it's becoming political.
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    I don't think I have a choice anymore.
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    It's just my reality.
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    To learn more about Art21 and our
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    educational resources please visit us
    online at pbs.org/art21
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    Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 9 is available on DVD
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    To order, visit shop.pbs.org or call 1-800 play PBS
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    This program is also available for download on iTunes.
Title:
Stephanie Syjuco in "San Francisco Bay Area" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Art21
Project:
"Art in the Twenty-First Century" broadcast series
Duration:
14:45

English subtitles

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